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A Systems Science Framework for Understanding the Nature of Governance

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A Systems Science Framework for Understanding the Nature of Governance A SYSTEMS SCIENCE FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF GOVERNANCE George Mobus Author Address ABSTRACT The natural world of life is replete with examples of systemic governance subsystems that operate to sustain the continuance of those systems. Every cell, organism, population, and ecosystem demonstrates various self-regulation and environmental coordination mechanisms that have evolved to ensure the long-term viability of that system. A formal approach from systems science that is built on these natural governance subsystems may provide some guidance to our understanding of human social systems and their governance. The emergence of higher levels of organization in the origins and evolution of life can be seen to be the story of increasing sophistication in governance subsystems as disparate complex adaptive systems coalesce into “societies” of interacting entities (super-molecules to primitive protocells, prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells, those to multicellular organisms, those to communities, etc.). At each stage in this on-going emergence of higher levels of organization the one consistent aspect is how hierarchical cybernetic structures have contributed to the stabilization of functional relations among the component entities leading to sustainable super-entity structures. The progression is from simple cooperation of multiple entities to intentional coordination emerging to manage complexity. Information processing and decision subsystems (agents) that took responsibility for logistical coordination among components and others that managed tactical coordination of the whole system with external (environmental) entities, resources, and threats evolved to keep increasingly complex biological entities able to maintain their existence and reproduction. Now the governance of human social systems that seek to exist in some kind of harmony with the Earth’s ecology (what I call the Ecos) has emerged in the last 100k years or so and evolved over that time frame to produce the modern socio-economic systems in existence today. But it (characterized here as the neoliberal capitalistic democracy) is not as evolved as, say, the mechanisms of metabolic regulation. There are numerous reasons to believe that the modern governance subsystem is, in fact, moving human societies toward the opposite of sustainable existence. A systems examination of the theory of governance subsystems (hierarchical cybernetics) suggests pathways toward a more functional governance subsystem for human societies. The theory covers the regulation of economic flows as well as the legal superstructure and moral/ethical aspects of culture that collectively constitutes the governance subsystem of a human society embedded in a meta-system, the Ecos. Keywords: Governance, Systems Science, Hierarchical Cybernetics, Social Emergence, Decision Agents 1 A Systems Science Framework for Governance INTRODUCTION We are faced with an extremely difficult set of problems as we acknowledge the Anthropocene as a new epoch. In fact one could easily argue that this age of geological markers put down by human activity is the result of a failure of our species to govern our interactions with the world and with each other. Our species is effectively out of control in terms of living in balance with the Earth as it has existed since after the Cretaceous– Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. As a result our activities are altering the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, and even the lithosphere. Nature is largely based on the idea that the complex cycles of those spheres interact with both positive and negative feedbacks that keep the environment on the surface relatively friendly to life in general (Lovelock, 2006). In some sense the Earth ecosystem (which I refer to as the “Ecos”) has achieved a relative dynamic steady state condition not unlike the pre-K-PG boundary. The biosphere has some resemblance to a mature body, which has developed and grown to its maximum size, or a quasi-stable climax ecosystem. Humans, through higher-order cognitive capacities, have broken out of the steady state and now almost resemble a kind of cancerous growth that threatens the rest of the biosphere, or at least a significant portion of it. It is ironic that this phenomenon is linked to the human desire to thrive and an abundance of intelligence for creating tools and technologies to presumably support that desire. Too much of a good thing is turning out to be not very good after all. It is also ironic that just as we are beginning to feel the impacts of the rapid changes that underlay the Anthropocene that same level of intelligence has allowed us to become conscious of what is happening through our invention and use of science. I think this is profoundly important. I propose that, in particular, the science of systems (systems thinking, systems approach, etc.) is a body of knowledge and a way of conceptualizing the world that holds a key to both understanding the whole of what is happening and to seeking a holistic set of solutions that might mitigate the worst effects of what the Anthropocene might offer. The State of Systems Science Sometime during World War II, in the United States and parts of Europe several threads of scientific investigation began to coalesce owing to their subjects having very strong relations. The war itself was a catalyst to promoting and bringing fields such as communication and information theory, control theory, computation theory, and others together under a loose rubric we recognize as systems science. At the same time, and especially shortly after the war, scientists from many different fields were coming to appreciate the idea of a unity of concepts that underlay all of the sciences, natural and social. During the forties and fifties there were many scientists who saw the grand unification of these various threads and began promoting the universal patterns of how things worked – general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968). But over the next five to six decades rapid progress within each of the original sub-fields, which meant pursuing traditional reductionist approaches, and coupled with a new 2 A Systems Science Framework for Governance emphasis in the tenure process at major universities on research publications in narrow domains, proceeded to create the same kinds of silos seen in ordinary sciences. Rather than integrating the concepts from these fields, they tended to develop in parallel, knowing something about each other but still focused on their particular viewpoint. Today we have network science, complexity science, cybernetics, information theory (and science), operations research, system dynamics, and so on. Interestingly writers in each of these fields refer to systems in the general sense, but tend to subsume the general concepts of systems under their own field’s title. Of course some kind of attention to details using reductionist methods is necessary but it is not sufficient to really grasp the whole nature of systems. Today it should be possible to think again of the reunification of these various areas of knowledge as they address a full understanding of how things work (Mobus and Kalton, 2014). This paper attempts such an approach as it applies to the concern for governance of human society, especially in the Anthropocene. Old Ideas with a New Framework A number of old ideas will be presented here, but what is new is a framework that builds from a reintegrated vision of systems science. This paper seeks to introduce the idea that a whole (and general) systems approach to governance is a potential first step toward moderating the Anthropocene. The fundamental idea is that nature is replete with examples of evolved governance systems for a variety of living systems and meta-systems (c.f. Beer, 1980, 1981). If these are understood they might provide models that could be used to design governance structures and mechanisms that will moderate the unbridled human craving for comfort and convenience that is largely responsible for our current state of affairs. The pathway to such understanding begins with a framework for analysis. There are a set of "principles" of systems science that have been distilled from the works of so many systems thinkers and theorists (Mobus and Kalton, 2014). Using those principles I propose an outline for that framework. The new ideas to be introduced are: • Complex Adaptive and Evolvable Systems (CAES) • Societies become entities in nature (Emergence), Bourke, 2011 o Major transitions, Smith & Szathmáry, 1995 o Hierarchy of emergences, Morowitz, 2004 o How evolution solves the governance problem in nature • Hierarchical cybernetic model (not just simple homeostatic feedback) • The problem with human decision makers – lack of adequate wisdom 3 A Systems Science Framework for Governance This is only an outline. I am developing a series of books that will add some flesh to this mere skeleton. The first will deal with the last bullet item, the condition of human mentality that leads to often faulty decisions (in terms of short-term and local scale thinking) with respect to the scale and scope of the ("wicked") problems we need to solve. The basic problem turns out to be that we humans have not evolved a sufficient capacity for species-level wisdom. This is a function of our brain development and I call this capacity "sapience" to recognize that fact (Mobus, 2015 in development). Governance, the subject of a second book in this series (Mobus, 2016, in early development), whether found in cells or corporations, depends on effective decision agents that are the proximate cause of corrective actions (which can be as simple as a thermostat or as complex as formulating policies). Human decision makers suffer from a number of deficits that result in faulty decision making; a prime reason why organizational governance systems frequently falter or fail. This will always need to be taken into account when designing a governance system to bring our species into accord with the rest of the Ecos. The answers (if they exist) will be found in the nature of complex systems and our understanding of them as phenomena.
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